1.
There are many things to write, one after another. It�s hard to keep track. It�s hard to keep all the things in one place long enough to put a word to it. So then it comes down to lots of words. Like a parking lot. A lot parked of words. A lot of parked words waiting for their trunks to be opened and one thing and another fit in, one after another. Too late, too late, like a highway. Try to catch a thought at eighty miles an hour for a center spot in a lot like this.
2.
A March baby. The ides of March. Ioanna of the winds, in like a lion, out like a lamb. Will you cry and keep mommy frayed at the nerves? Daddy�s like a cut tree: rootless and felled, hard to move at the sound. I dreamt you and of you. Still not real even with my hand on your mother�s belly in the dark, every night and morning.
3.
Eighty on the way home, surreal state until someone else swerves, or the tires feel like they�re going to buckle, then it�s jagged edge and fear and more surreal than ever. Will I ever get home? Can I stop here? Or maybe here? Sunlight over the edge, shot through the eyes, skidding across pot holes, home stretch and the last cigarette of the night plumes the lungs.
4.
What will I pass down unto to you? Ted says his two sons are remarkably different already. The child is born made, not molded. Already and the oldest has only just broken four. The younger is barely two. And you can tell, even from here, you can tell. Already different, one listens the other�s unruly. One plays with you, the other finds you in the way. Barely an impression, or at the very least, it doesn�t seem that there�s been an impression yet to have been made. Already there, marked distinct, fingerprint of God.
5.
She could not measure the heartbeat, the fetus would not hold still, no markers to be made of this child. You got a wily one here.
6.
You are no longer strange to me and I find a pocket there that I would like to snug into, crook in your neck that I want to nuzzle. A little bit of beast for you that has been tamed. And I can only go on like this for so long, putting it to words before I realize the immensity of not being able to put any word to it. At any angle, the skin tone is the same: always soft, full hue, fresh and thin skinned, as if fresh skinned, rice paper, delicate but never fragile. You�re my crumbly girl, but you endure. That�s what you�ve gotten from your mother, a quality of perpetual endurance.
7.
There was a time I could bang out a page in under five minutes. It didn�t always make sense, but there was a stream, a well worn stream, but something to dip into nonetheless. It�s taken over forty-five minutes now in 2004. You�re only two months away.